Six million unemployed

© db artmag Helplessness, hopelessness, dreariness: unemployed 1932, painting by Karl Hofer

Reich Labour Ministry figures released on 15 February 1932 show that Germany has nearly 6.2 million unemployed. The world-wide economic crisis which erupted in the wake of „Black Friday“ – New York’s devastating Wall Street stock market crash on 25 October 1929 – caused a drop in German industrial production to 60 per cent of its 1928 level. Economic, social and political tensions in Germany have continued to intensify, and radical movements, especially the national socialist „Sturmabteilung“ (SA), become reservoirs of the discontented, among them many young people.